is a cooperation of different research groups at the German universities of Bielefeld, Frankfurt, Regensburg and Tübingen, coordinated at Goethe-University Frankfurt/Germany and funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research.

 

Computational Historical Semantics is a fundamental innovation in information technology for Digital Humanities which aims at defining historical-semantic spaces. Within in the field of text mining, this method will enable the computer based research of the linguistic and socio-cultural basis of processes of linguistic change. Its sustainable use will be guaranteed by a purely web-based information system, the eHumanities Desktop. Thereby, three levels of Digital Humanities are addressed:

• Phenomena of syntactical, semantic and pragmatic change in a uniform model
• The exploration of linguistic processes in the context of socio-cultural processes
• The integration of hitherto isolated methods of Humanities and Computer Linguistics in one single instrument

The internationally singular information processing system eHumanities Desktop will be suitable for every corpus language and it will be applicable to all disciplines of Humanities at any time. Already established approaches to an automatic computation of the meaning of linguistic entities are intended to be utilized also for Humanities. Therefore, our project aims at expanding the representation model 'semantic spaces' to a historical-semantic and to a historical-syntagmatic dimension.

 

Expected Results:

 

1. Linguistics and History

• New insights in processes of linguistic change, lexicalization and grammaticalization
• Databases for research on linguistic change
• Lexical resources for research on late medieval documents

2. Digital Humanities und Computer Sciences

• Historical-semantic spaces as a new method of text mining
• eHumanities Desktop as a new instrument for research in Humanities

 

Subproject 1: Identifying and Describing Phenomena of Linguistic Change

 

Principal Investigator:  Prof. Dr. Dessi Schmid (Prof. Dr. Peter Koch), Romanisches Seminar, Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen.

• Research in long-term changes of the origin and spreading of new lexical meanings, especially in the cognitive-semantic fields 'existence and localization'
• Together with subproject 3: Systematically embedding the processes of change in social institutions and common usage
• Together with subproject 4: Developing and checking new digital modes of processing and query

  

Subproject 2: Identifying and Describing Phenomena of Linguistic Change

 

Principal Investigators: Prof. Dr. Barbara Job, Fakultät für Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft, Universität Bielefeld; Prof. Dr. Maria Selig, Institut für Romanistik, Universität Bielefeld.

• Research in long-term changes of the origin and spreading of new grammatical techniques, especially in the cognitive-semantic fields 'situation / determination and possession / temporal orientation'
• Together with subproject 3: Systematically embedding the processes of change in social institutions and common usage
• Together with subproject 4: Developing and checking new digital modes of processing and query

 

Subproject 3: Historical Approaches towards Processes of Linguistic Change

 

Principal Investigator: Prof. Dr. Bernhard Jussen, Historisches Seminar, Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main 

• Research in the development of political languages in post-Roman societies; examination of their changes during the Middle Ages with regard to vernacular political languages. Together with subprojects 1 and 2, also verbs will be analysed in this respect.
• Revealing the difference between classical and corpus-linguistically assisted hermeneutics
• Together with other subprojects: supporting a lexico-syntacticon of the political medieval language in technical and intellectual respect

  

Subproject 4: Computer-Based Modeling of Linguistic Change with the eHumanities Desktop

 

Principal Investigator: Prof. Dr. Alexander Mehler, Fachbereich für Mathematik und Informatik, Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main

 

• Developing preprocessors (lemmatization, tagging, parsing) for Latin
• Modeling time series of Latin linguistic data
• Modeling 'historical-semantic spaces' 
• Together with the other subprojects: developing text-technological methods for the investigation of linguistic change